


you are everything i know

by cosettefauchelevents



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, I mean everyone else is here but this is Constance's show, It's her world we're just living in it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 22:06:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10201742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosettefauchelevents/pseuds/cosettefauchelevents
Summary: “Take me home,” she says, and it’s not until much later she realises the truth of that request.Not “Take me to my husband,” or “Take me to my house”: "Take me home."D’Artagnan is home, and a part of her has always known that, has always known from the moment he fell at her feet that home is a Gascon farm boy with a grin like tinder catching.





	

“Take me home,” she says, and it’s not until much later she realises the truth of that request.

Not “Take me to my husband,” or “Take me to my house”: "Take me home."

D’Artagnan _is_ home, and a part of her has always known that, has always known from the moment he fell at her feet that home is a Gascon farm boy with a grin like tinder catching.

The first time he kissed her, it felt oddly familiar: as if in another lifetime, another boy and girl stood in this market and kissed like no-one chased them. Despite the shock and the panic, as he’d walked away to the garrison she felt a tiny tug at seeing him walk out the door.

Her house, the one she shared with Jacques, had never felt like a home, just somewhere she stayed and kept her clothes; odd that she never realises until D’Artagnan leaves and it feels as it always has: cold.

He brings nothing but trouble: her meals are always disrupted by _someone_ barging in, pistol in hand, with some new adventure for him; his sheets seem to be constantly covered in muck and pistol grease and blood; he pays his rent in random coins she’s fairly sure he begs from kind hearted tavern ladies; he dents every doorway he passes through with his scabbard. She’s never been happier, even when at night her hand reaches for his and finds Jacques instead.

And then he kisses her, properly this time, and she knows everything she’s felt up to now has been a sham compared to this: this is laughing in church and stealing apples and fireworks on a tranquil night and _everything._ He holds her and she tries to summon the grace to feel guilty, and fails again and again. She laughs more, head up high and proud, her clothes looser, more free. It’s as if D’Artagnan opened a door within her and now she wants everything, _now_ : she wants to run and shoot and fight a war, to read every book she finds, to eat peaches at noon on a Sunday. To kiss him, again and again, like a drunkard draining the bottle. She _is_ drunk: for the first time she understands Athos. Being with D’Artagnan is whiskey, golden-bright and warm: without him she feels flat, aching, numb. She sees Athos, pain in his grey eyes, hunched over a tankard, and she knows exactly how it feels to find something that makes you fly, and how low it is when they leave.

Aramis knows, of course he does: he gives her an appraising look as he passes her, followed by a swift congratulatory grin. Porthos just seems pleased that everyone’s happy, clapping D’Artagnan on the back more than is strictly necessary. Athos looks like a man who already knows too much that he shouldn’t and really doesn’t care for much more.

Oh, D’Artagnan’s home. All six feet of warm enthusiasm and earnestness and eyes that make her forget every prayer she’s ever learnt: just knowing he’ll come back at the end of the day makes her feel lighter than air, even when Jacques is droning on about fabric prices across the table.

Constance says six Hail Marys every night before bed, in an attempt to atone for her almost indecent happiness, and hopes that someone up there understands.

 

And then it transpires that clearly they do not. For a second- a brief, shining second- it seems as if Jacques might listen, might let her go; and then all the air is sucked out of the room. He’ll kill him. Because of her. D’Artagnan’s long legs will kick at the end of a rope, and it will be entirely her fault.

And so she cuts out her own heart, like a girl in a fairytale, and throws it to the wolves for him.

“But I don’t love you,” she says, and how can the words _hurt_ as they leave her mouth, how can they feel like lead weights dropping into the pit of her stomach?

She can never forget the things she says then, awful, cruel things, and he won’t go, won’t leave even though she knows she’s crucifying him, and why can’t he see she’s doing this for him?

“I have far too much to lose,” she says, and she’s lying.

There is nothing to lose without him.

 

Constance’s house becomes a tomb again, silent and reproaching. Her meals are precisely on time and never interrupted and her sheets are spotless. Sometimes she runs a hand over the dents in the doorframes and feels the corresponding scratches deep within her chest. She doesn’t laugh anymore.

When she hears he’s shot Athos it’s the first time she’s heard his name in weeks and the sound of it is like a blow to the stomach. Of course she picks up her skirts and runs, of course she drops everything to follow the girl: when she is eighty years old and bedridden and feeble she will still run to him the moment he calls her name, the minute he needs her.

Stronger than the fear when the stranger steps out is the awful dread certainty that creeps over her: D’Artagnan will save her. He always does. The thought rises up and she bats it away, a sob catching in her throat. Why should he save her? Why should he lift a finger to help someone whose last words to him were unforgivable?

No, Constance decides. She will simply have to save herself.

“I’m not frightened of you,” she says, and it’s the first time since D’Artagnan left that she isn’t lying. What has she got left to be frightened of?

“I’m really going to enjoy killing you in a couple of hours,” the man tells her, hot breath stinking on her face, and she hears D’Artagnan’s voice in her head: “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever known.”

Constance looks back at him with the hatred of a hundred women in her veins.

 

It’s only when Milady arrives that she feels real fear. Athos is dead: the fact sinks like a stone into her, robbing her of her breath. D’Artagnan _killed_ him, killed Athos, who has been more of a father to him than anyone. Athos, who taught him how to duel. Athos, who left her a flask of mead the day after D’Artagnan left, a note in his slanting scrawl beside it: “it never gets easier. mead helps.” Athos, the saddest man in Paris and the strongest, who now lies in a Musketeer grave at D’Artagnan’s hand.

 _She_ did it, this unholy abomination of a woman, she broke a band of brothers and lured D’Artagnan, the brightest, the boldest, the most _good_ of them, down with her. Never again will she walk into a tavern and pull Athos out of it, never will she see him winking wryly at her as Aramis and Porthos scrap, never again will she walk the streets with four men behind her who would die for each other. And it is entirely Milady’s fault.

“You have such spirit,” the woman tells her, fingers brushing Constance’s curls. “I can tell what D’Artagnan sees in you.”

The present tense kills her.

 

Constance learns very quickly what any soldier knows: it isn’t the fear that kills you, it’s the waiting. They wait on the cobbles, the spot where Sarazin’s pistol is aimed deadly cold under her ribs, the silence smothering. A million prayers rush through her mind: that they won’t come, that they will come, that D’Artagnan will be long gone, that he’ll be there…

The cart rattles down the street.

And suddenly it explodes into noise, and he’s there, D’Artagnan, atop the cart like some furious avenging angel, and she’s safe, because there is nothing he knows better than a fight. A bullet whistles over her head and she sees Athos and starts, wondering why his ghost would choose this street of all places to haunt. Then she sees a man fall by his (very much corporeal) hand and feels relief flood her: of course D’Artagnan would never kill him; of course this isn’t the end. Musketeers don’t die easily.

Merchant’s wives, however, do.

This isn’t what any of them know: how does one train for the wife of one’s best friend taking the lover of another hostage? Aramis looks as lost as she’s ever seen him, D’Artagnan’s eyes as bright as steel as Athos takes one step, and then another, towards where she and Milady stand in their perverse embrace. And now Constance is scared, because they can take down men and armies and Red Guards, but you cannot kill a demon, and this woman is Athos’, right down to the chain around his neck.

They have destroyed each other, the pair of them, and Constance knows it: knows they will never be happy until they’re both dead. D’Artagnan takes a step forward, and Milady’s arm twitches, and in the stab of fear she knows something.

She won’t live without him.

Milady’s distracted, her green eyes fixed on Athos, and Constance remembers D’Artagnan’s instructions in the shooting gallery: always use your advantage. In this case, her advantage is that Milady is so caught up in enacting her grand revenge she’s unlikely to be paying much attention to Constance, loosely held under her shaking arm.

She runs.

Runs straight into D’Artagnan’s arms, those arms that smell like leather and smoke and home, and cries like a child, because she might have lost him and never told him the truth, and she cannot live like this any longer, not when life is so fragile.

 

They walk back to her house, the very presence of him next to her a magnet, his hand just catching hers.

“Someone might see us,” she protests, more out of habit than anything, and knows when she looks into his eyes that things can never be as they were.

And then Constance Bonacieux, respected wife of a respectable man, lets the decidedly unrespectable Musketeer D’Artagnan kiss her, right in the middle of the street, and her conscience doesn’t even murmur.

Heaven decides she’s clearly had her fill of happiness.

 

They cannot go on, not when a man’s life is at stake. Not even when that man is Jacques, with his whining voice and his pleading kicked-dog eyes, ordering her never to leave him. Constance remembers the stories she was told as a girl, about the punishments meted out to adulteresses, the burnings and the scourgings and the loss of their immortal soul, and D’Artagnan is worth them all. But a man’s life on their conscience? It will curse them.

Never mind that Constance is already damned.

“He’ll never make you happy,” D’Artagnan says, and it breaks her heart to think of a world without him, of a lifetime measuring fabric and making meals and never, never flying the way she did with him. Of never being home. She looks at every inch of him, trying to memorise the way his pauldron fits, the fall of the dark hair around his neck, the curve of his jaw. Every bit of her is being torn apart.

“Goodbye, D’Artagnan. It was a beautiful dream.” And this is agony, this is punishment, this is God laughing at her, miserable sinner she was with the temerity to cling on to a wonderful fantasy.

He kisses her cheek, and she knows this is the last time she will ever feel anything even approaching happiness. She can feel moisture on her face and she doesn’t know whose tears they are, doesn’t care, as long as he stays there with his hair tickling her neck, stubble grazing her mouth.

He walks away, and she tells him the only thing she never said, the only true thing that matters. He walks away, and Constance’s home leaves with him.

**Author's Note:**

> oh my god. i love them so much. SO MUCH. i just want to sort of absorb them. you know? you know.  
> ALSO: have just realised d'artagnan doesn't actually say the bravest woman thing in s1.however. u cannot tell me that boy did not say something of that effect BEFOREHAND. boy is besotted.


End file.
